“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.

Extreme Rainfall Trends In Australia

As promised, a look at the Australian climate extremes graphs for precipitation, as presented by the BOM.

Most of the extreme rainfall graphs show a similar pattern, so I have picked this one, defined as “Annual total precipitation when daily precipitation > 99th percentile”.

This, in theory, takes account of varying rainfall expectations from region to region, as the BOM explain:

Extreme climate events such as heat waves, cold snaps, floods and dry spells have significant impacts on society. To examine whether such extremes have changed over time a variety of extreme climate indices can be defined, such as the number of days per year which exceed, or fail to exceed, fixed thresholds. However, since people tend to adapt to their local climate, a threshold considered extreme in one part of Australia could be considered quite normal in another. To overcome this problem, thresholds based on percentile values can also be defined.

The same increasing weather extremes argument was made in Chapter 1 of the 2014 US National Climate Assessment. I was able to debunk every single one of the examples using readily available US historical data. Essay Credibility Conundrums in ebook Blowing Smoke. Drought, flood, heatwave, rainfall, blizzards, tornados, …